Cyber-Watergate?

The release of the DNC emails provides lots of Schaednfreudtastic smiles at the expense of the criminal conspiracy that calls itself a political party, but if it is indeed the work of a foreign intelligence service (Russia most likely), then they probably have the RNC’s emails, too. Will they appear in due course?

Perhaps this should be regarded as a cyber-Watergate: a political dirty trick aimed at helping one party over another. One lesson is clear: the two old Washington rules that nothing is ever off the record and that all microphones are live should now be amended: all your emails are essentially public. Write them accordingly. Maybe you should just pick up the old telephone and communicate the old fashioned way.

But the final but of Schadenfreude to be enjoyed from this spectacle is the thought that maybe the Left shouldn’t have been so quick to laud Wikileaks in the first place. From DemocracyNow in 2013:

As Edward Snowden’s father, Lon, arrives in Moscow to try to visit his son, we speak to American Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Anthony Romero about Snowden and the significance of his leaks about the National Security Agency. “Edward Snowden has done this country a service,” Romero says. “He has kick-started a debate that we didn’t have. This debate was anemic.” Hossam Bahgat of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights adds, “We are all affected by the NSAprogram. We cannot do our work in Egypt, in Canada or Israel or Kenya when we cannot communicate, when we know our emails could be intercepted by the United States security apparatus.”